Just in time, I just finished playing System Shock 2 a week ago after having played all 3 Bioshock games!

In answer to the question: I think so. SS2 has aged surprisingly well for a game that is nearly 20 years old (Besides the shitty graphics, but the excellent art and level design can make up for that if you're not overly demanding). It's not as frenetic and pick-and-play as Bioshock, but its harder and therefore it feels more rewarding to do well. The gameplay mechanics are deeper but it's all rather organic and you can make do with whatever build you wanna go with (Except Exotic weapons, they suck, minus the Crystal Shard). Bioshock is a lot more fast paced, but with no dedicated builds and all plasmids at your disposal with no penalties you feel like too much of a god, where as in SS2 you still felt vulnerable even when you get later in the game and have gotten the OP Assault Rifle and improved the Grenade Launcher to the max.

I found the story in SS2 to be easier to follow and I liked the characters more because people here actually seemed normal, whereas in Bioshock, which pretty much had the same plot, everyone was fucking insane or just straight up evil, and it just isn't as relatable, even Andrew Ryan was fascinating villain. SS2's ending was really dumb though, even if I laughed (Because I'm an idiot), but besides that, no real complaints.

They strive for different things despite being similar in a lot of things (Namely, SS2 wants to hybrid (heh) FPS and RPGs together, where as Bioshock is a straight shooter with barely anything to do with RPGs), and they're both pretty fun, but SS2 is more rewarding and I feel much more compelled to repeat than I can ever recall feeling about Bioshock, which is really saying something because I actually played Bioshock quite a bit.

There is no such thing as an MGS game with a good plot

If he can play TF2 then he should be able to play Stalker just fine (at least the first one, haven't played the presequels/expansions yet). My laptop (HP 4530s i3) can't make TF2 playable but I play STALKER with a pretty much perfectly stable framerate (Don't know the exact numbers, haven't meassured them).

Anyway, I'll put all the games I've put on my laptop that are actually playable assuming you're willing to sacrifice visuals (In some cases). I don't think my laptop is much more or anymore powerful than your computer, so if it works for me, it should work for you:

Resident Evil 4, 5 (yep, 5 is perfectly playable on my laptop)

Deus Ex 1 + Human Revolution (Had to lower the resolution and all the advanced settings are on low but it plays pretty smoothly)

Thief 2

System Shock 2

Bioshock 1 + Infinite (Had to lower EVERYTHING from the latter to almost the bare minimum to get it to run smoothly, but it works)

The Witcher (1) Enhanced Edition (Full res with most settings on medium)

Dota 2 (full res, most settings disable/minimum except textures)

Limbo

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl (Full res, most settings on the medium range but the FPS is pretty smooth).

So years back, I gave STALKER (the first one) a try, and while I don't remember being particularly displeased with anything (But my memory is bad), I never really played it for more than like an hour. I think it was probably because I couldn't get used to the shooting.

I'm going to spare you the details and simply get straight to the point: I ended up revisiting it recently, and I liked the game. I haven't actually finished it yet (But I'm close, I just finished running thru Pripyat), but I am already thinking of giving it another run, this time taking my time and rushing it less (Although I haven't decided if I wanna play the other STALKER games before or after that). But before anything happens, I want my second playthrough to be with mods, because I've been told that this game has some extraordinary mods that change the experience a lot and I'm curious to see what kind of changes I'll find now that I have a point of comparison, being one of the apparently rare few that has actually played the vanilla game.

But I'm a bit overwhelmed - I look for mod guides and try to see what should I go for but the game has so many game-changing projects that it becomes difficult to even know where to start with all of it. So I took the ones that seemed the most popular and boiled them down to just 3 choices: Complete, Oblivion Lost (not the remake), and LURK.

Basically I want help in trying to decide which mod among these should I go for. I am aware of what they do to an extent (Except LURK, which I have literally no idea what it serves for but I've been told it's mindblowing). I know they for the most part change the experience a ton, but I have no idea what's most ideal for me, I've tried to look for comparisons and have yet to find something super concrete (Especially for LURK, which, again, I have 0 clue what it does). If somebody could help me out in deciding what to go for and what they think is the best of the bunch, I would be very grateful.

Also, I know some of these mods change the game visually for the better. I played the game on a crappy HP 4530s notebook, and can play it at an actually pretty good fps even when stuff gets busy (though it chugs hard sometimes). How much more demanding are these mods? Could I possibly run them fine on my computer and if not, I'm guessing I can turn down the graphics overhaul to make it playable, right?

Do they still make printed magazines? I used to buy them quite frequently, until they just stopped showing up at my local bookshop. I never found out if it was because they didn't publish them anymore or they just weren't delivering them here anymore.

Looks more like Dead Space with less flickering lights and in first person to me

Wasn't aware anything other than Google was worth using

Any game with almost/no story.

Probably no more than medium settings.

It's more accurate to say I grew into it - I was a "classy" kid that thought metal was meathead music during most of high school, until I removed the massive stick up my ass and learned what fun was.

Same thing goes for a lot of genres, tho.